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The tumblr purge
Dec. 4th, 2018 10:07 amThe tumblr purge of December 2018 is a historic act of mass censorship of adult material on that site. The announcement, titled "A better, more positive tumblr," is a declaration of a pogrom.
As thousands of blogs now prepare to leave tumblr ahead of the December 17 deadline, taking with them the core of an entire culture which has existed for eleven years, this is a personal response to the tumblr management on my own tumblr blog, HExEr.
Dear tumblr staff
You’ve just destroyed everything of light and love on this site.
You host nazis, and flag sex positive sites. You allow right-wing bloggers free rein to express their abhorrent views on gay people, bi people, trans people, and POC. You threaten to shut down the blogs of young trans people, and gay and bi people, who have been using their blogs to express their journeys in coming out and transitioning.
You say that you’re removing the adult material to allow for more sex positivity - yet your clumsily-worded “female presenting nipples” is infantile and legally vague. Your algorithms are, in fact, flagging fanfic and fanart blogs in defiance of your assurances that you would not, in fact, be doing this.
Your purge will decimate thousands of blogs, but what will you leave behind? Nothing. You’ll be driving away all the people who make the hilarious 3am posts, the strangely insightful weird material that people write when they’re stoned, the “shower thoughts” posts.
All the young people who write their coming out stories - they’re not going to wait for you to come for them next. They’re going away now. And with them, a community spirit you’ve accreted for eleven years will be going away, forever, because their trust in you is now gone.
It’s gone, because you’re happy to brand them as porn blogs too. Away with them all, the model set card posts and the coming out posts, the public hypno fora, the kink positive blogs, everyone who came to this blog to express their sexuality, to share their desires. It’s all the same as the commercial stuff to you. It’s all smut; and, like Dolores Umbridge, you’ve decided that it’s all got to go.
But it was the heart of the community that you’re trying to protect. And you just cut it out and threw it away.
Do you think that cat pics and landscape pics, and Klingon language blogs and posts about the books of Robert Greene, are going to sustain this site after your blindfolded, ham-handed pogrom? Do you think that spiral gifs are going to be enough to keep this site commercially viable?
And do you think that new people are going to come to this site, now that you’ve set fire to it?
Think about what it means when I say: You’ve destroyed everything of light and love on this site. What you’re doing is setting fire to the neighbourhood to get rid of a single spider.
As thousands of blogs now prepare to leave tumblr ahead of the December 17 deadline, taking with them the core of an entire culture which has existed for eleven years, this is a personal response to the tumblr management on my own tumblr blog, HExEr.
Dear tumblr staff
You’ve just destroyed everything of light and love on this site.
You host nazis, and flag sex positive sites. You allow right-wing bloggers free rein to express their abhorrent views on gay people, bi people, trans people, and POC. You threaten to shut down the blogs of young trans people, and gay and bi people, who have been using their blogs to express their journeys in coming out and transitioning.
You say that you’re removing the adult material to allow for more sex positivity - yet your clumsily-worded “female presenting nipples” is infantile and legally vague. Your algorithms are, in fact, flagging fanfic and fanart blogs in defiance of your assurances that you would not, in fact, be doing this.
Your purge will decimate thousands of blogs, but what will you leave behind? Nothing. You’ll be driving away all the people who make the hilarious 3am posts, the strangely insightful weird material that people write when they’re stoned, the “shower thoughts” posts.
All the young people who write their coming out stories - they’re not going to wait for you to come for them next. They’re going away now. And with them, a community spirit you’ve accreted for eleven years will be going away, forever, because their trust in you is now gone.
It’s gone, because you’re happy to brand them as porn blogs too. Away with them all, the model set card posts and the coming out posts, the public hypno fora, the kink positive blogs, everyone who came to this blog to express their sexuality, to share their desires. It’s all the same as the commercial stuff to you. It’s all smut; and, like Dolores Umbridge, you’ve decided that it’s all got to go.
But it was the heart of the community that you’re trying to protect. And you just cut it out and threw it away.
Do you think that cat pics and landscape pics, and Klingon language blogs and posts about the books of Robert Greene, are going to sustain this site after your blindfolded, ham-handed pogrom? Do you think that spiral gifs are going to be enough to keep this site commercially viable?
And do you think that new people are going to come to this site, now that you’ve set fire to it?
Think about what it means when I say: You’ve destroyed everything of light and love on this site. What you’re doing is setting fire to the neighbourhood to get rid of a single spider.
